


Mildred.

by ChristenKimbell



Category: Ratched (TV)
Genre: ... it didn't, F/M, I am one, I love Cuckoo for what it says about institutions, and I wanted Ratched to fix that so badly, and we can be like Mildred, anyone ever known nurses in real life?, but it totally fucks over its female characters, so this is a quick sketch about Mildred, way too easily
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-13
Updated: 2021-01-13
Packaged: 2021-03-18 08:49:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,166
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28740525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChristenKimbell/pseuds/ChristenKimbell
Summary: Why was Mildred the way she was?A grounded origin story.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 9





	Mildred.

**Author's Note:**

> The scariest thing about Nurse Ratched is that she's a recognizable human being. If anyone's ever worked in this kind of setting, you'll know intimately how easy it is to become like her. 
> 
> She thinks she's helping. She's got all the control and protocol in the world on her side precisely because in her mind it's helping people thrive. Which is exactly what makes her an important warning of what you can turn into if you're not careful. That you can do evil to people while being convinced that you're doing good.
> 
> It really takes very, very little to see McMurphy as an evil force, the way Nurse Ratched would have seen him, instead of a fun freeing one. That's the entire magic of Cuckoo's Nest IMO. 
> 
> Any of us could be this awful in the right circumstances.
> 
> Side note: In doing research for this, I found out that Louise Fletcher played Mildred as an old virgin who was deeply attracted to McMurphy, which is a potent idea I wind up running with here.

The most important thing to know about Mildred was that she was ordinary. 

Nothing about her was remarkable. Not her birth: she was born in a generically small town a half-hour north of San Fransisco, California, in 1919, to two expats from Europe who barely spoke English. Not her name: Mildred, gentle strength, a common name among other girls her age. Not her looks: even as a young child she was drab, plain, with brown hair and a sallow face. 

Perhaps the only distinctive feature about her were her ice blue eyes ... and those were only noticeable if you got close.

Even as a child, Mildred never had anyone get close.

The year she was born was the year of the Spanish Flu, arriving in San Fransisco one year after the end of the Great War. Her father and mother, traumatized by war and wrung out by poverty, were distant and unloving. Most people on the street wore white cloth masks. No children were allowed out to play with her. By five, Mildred knew loneliness more intimately than she'd ever come to know anything else. She would play alone and, once she learned to read, read alone. She had no friends and would go days without being touched or acknowledged at all. 

When Mildred was five, her father suffered a back injury while building a house for a neighbor. He recruited Mildred to help him finish the house. It was the first time her father had asked anything of her, and Mildred dove into the task with hungry enthusiasm. She held piles of nails while her father pounded the hammer, tried to drag sections of log twice her size, and didn't mind when it began to rain and get dark - all because, for the first time, her father was paying attention to her.

Then, on the roof of that house, in the rain and the dark, his foot slipped, and he fell off the roof onto a few sections of wood, which splintered underneath him, completely breaking his back. Unable to get up, moaning in pain, pale and gray, he wouldn't speak to Mildred or open his eyes. 

Sobbing with terror, some of his blood staining the front of her shirt, she fled into town - a three mile run in dark, slippery rain - and went to the nearest building with lamps still burning. The residents of that building ran down the street to wake a nurse. And the nurse ran with Mildred back to where her father lay.

Mildred stood feet away, watching the nurse stop the bleeding and save her father's life. 

While they loaded her father onto a stretcher, the nurse turned to Mildred and hugged her. It was the first hug of Mildred's life. And in that moment something woke in her. She'd never be pretty, she'd never be special. But she could save lives, just like this nurse had. And in saving lives ... maybe she could learn to be useful. 

And maybe in learning to be useful, she could learn how to be loved. 

As Mildred grew older, she stole copies of the American Nursing Journal just to improve her skills. She made meals and mowed lawns of other nurses in the neighborhood just to learn more. As the market crashed, her father couldn't get work and her mother took on working in a textile mill to provide for all three of them, Mildred was able to start at small nursing jobs and work her way up. She was good at it. By the time she was sixteen she'd left high school to do nursing full time, using most of her paychecks to support her now bedridden father. Still with no close friends, still with distant parents, Mildred found that the only place she fit in was at work. 

She mattered there. When she arrived and put on the stiff white uniform, she felt a sense of belonging. When she was on the floor, she learned to look for need. To anticipate what patients needed and give it to them before they could even articulate it themselves.

It gave her a sense of worth, and a sense of direction, and so she worked and worked and worked. When other women her age were off partying and dating and dancing and watching movies - while everyone her age survived the Great Depression by having as much fun as they could - she worked. And she loved it, because it made her feel like she mattered. Like she was important. 

Like she was something other than ordinary. 

When she was seventeen, her parents introduced her to a boy her age that went to her church. He worked at a welding plant, long hard hours. Just like you, said her mother: he has a good work ethic, he's managed to keep his job, and he's responsible. 

The boy was distant and polite. Mildred went on one single date with him to a movie where they sat side by side while couples around them necked in the dark. He smelled like sweat and salt. He kept his eyes forward the entire time, and they never even held hands. 

They married six months later, in the church they both attended, wearing a borrowed dress and a borrowed suit. Mildred's mother and father attended and repeated over and over how much he was a nice boy. The only time Mildred and the nice boy touched were when they exchanged rings. Not even a kiss, just rings. And a week later, Mildred moved from her parents house to live with the boy in a tiny house at the back of his own parents' property. 

They spent three years that way, living in that small back house, staying employed while most people on the streets stood in breadlines. They barely spoke. He never tried to touch her and Mildred never asked him to try. It wasn't just that she lacked the language to ask but that she also lacked the desire. He was a nice boy - and that's all he was. It crossed her mind, as she worked long hours in her nursing station and he worked long hours welding metal to metal, as they fell asleep on opposite ends of the bed with not even their feet touching, that perhaps he wanted more and simply didn't know how to ask. There were a few times where he refused to meet her eyes, a few times where sadness crossed his face. But they never did speak of it. 

When Mildred was twenty two years old, Japanese planes destroyed Pearl Harbor. She was in a line to enlist as a nurse in the service as soon as she possibly could be. She knew that her husband was somewhere in another line, enlisting to fight, but Mildred never once saw him. 

He shipped out before she did, and they shared one goodbye kiss. It was her first kiss and possibly his too. Just one close brush of skin on skin, clammy, sticky and half-hearted. Then he left her standing in the doorway. She didn't miss him once he was gone, of course, because how can you miss someone who was barely present to begin with? 

She was sent to England for training, taught an entirely new set of skills in cold white buildings that all looked identical, in a city that held its breath during the bombings. Lessons on field sanitation, resuscitation practices, the administration of anesthetics. Then she put on her white hat and climbed into a military van filled with other nurses whose final destination was a firebombed battlefield in France. 

It changed her. 

For the first time in her life Mildred saw buildings crowded with dead and dying people. She saw people burned to death, stabbed and bleeding, begging for help, begging to stay alive, begging for their mothers. Men carried in on pole-lined stretchers and carried out cold covered in blankets. A neverending onslaught of pain and death in makeshift tents in the cold and wet and bloody and beautiful winter woods of France. All in that first month. And for that first month, if any men were able-bodied, they were too shellshocked to respond to the treatments she administered, or so starved for attention that they saw her as a prospect, ring be damned, while they sat or lay on endlessly filthy and cold cots. And why shouldn't they, here at the end of the world? She felt disgust at the dirt and blood and infection and wet mud sweat stink of them all. She never felt clean, she never felt safe, and most importantly she felt she was no longer competent enough to stay calm and be a good nurse. 

As another endlessly bloody month passed, as one battle ended and the truck carried them to some other battlefield where they set up the tents all over again, Mildred felt unable to stop the onslaught of war, battles, severed jugulars, crush wounds, shattered ankles, gut wounds, broken arms. She was overwhelmed with the constant onslaught of need and suffering. Her coldness cracked and panic set in. She stopped sleeping. She'd never felt any emotion so strongly as this overwhelmed feeling, and it began to eat her alive. Her work suffered and more people died on her watch. Soldiers and nurses and civilians too. 

At last, Mildred reached a day where she became completely frozen in the midst of eight cots full of people. Half of them were nurses. She was the only nurse on duty for the next hour. She found herself just standing, frozen, unable to move in the middle of the room, hearing a woman behind her cry softly, hearing a man to her right moan from the pain. Here, at last, she was fully unable to help anyone, not even herself, and the fear and sorrow of that realization kept her frozen there for several minutes. She was the only nurse in this tent and she was now trapped in an entire world that was slowly bleeding to death with no chance of escape and no hope for improvement or shelter.

Then, in that long, forever-long outstretching frozen moment of every wounded person in the room begging for help and her being unable to move ... the soldier right in front of her, covered in a bloodstained blanket, his face and neck swollen from injury, grabbed her wrist.

He pulled her down toward him and Mildred, unable to resist physically anymore, told him to stop. He didn't stop. He pulled her until they were face to face, her on her knees in front of the cot, his bloody smashed face inches away.

"Doris," he said. "Doris."

Mildred again told him to stop. Her voice seemed small and faint. Instead of listening, the soldier grabbed for her breast with his free hand and squeezed. She felt dull pain and dull panic in equal measure.

"Doris oh thank God," he said. "My head hurts somethin awful. Doris." 

She pushed him. Or tried to. Her hand landed in the hot, pulsing, infected flesh of his face and sunk in wrist deep. 

He moaned, let go, collapsed back on the cot, confused, begging "Doris?" She felt his grip loosen and stumbled backward, half onto another cot and half into a cart of medical supplies, which fell to the ground, taking her with it with a clatter and someone's distant shriek.

On the cart, something pushed into her side - she discovered later that it was a surgical knife - and as she rolled to a stop on the floor she felt a hot slice of pain in her own abdomen.

Someone came running toward her, she couldn't see who, and someone else was weeping, close in her ear. Mildred gained her feet and fled from the med tent, stopping five hundred or so feet away, in silent shock, bleeding - and then collapsing to her knees and sitting, motionless.

Another nurse came to check on her nearly an hour later. In that time, Mildred had simply sat, perfectly still, in the mud, looking out toward a bombed building, watching rain come down all around. The nurse offered to bind Mildred's side. Mildred barely heard her but instead asked about the man calling for Doris. "He passed a few minutes ago," the nurse told her. 

Mildred, calm and removed and distant from all sound and feeling, had already known. She'd felt that flesh, how soft it was. And in that moment, looking at the nurse with her ice-blue eyes, Mildred knew she could never allow this to happen again. It had not been his fault that he was suffering infection. It had not been his fault that he was suffering delirium. It had been her fault, however, that she had frozen in that moment and not been able to help him. 

In that moment, she made a vow: from this moment forward, whether she survived the war or anything else, she would always stick to protocol, and she'd always stay in control, and she'd attend to her duty from now on, no matter what else occurred. 

The nurse offered again to wipe the blood away and bandage Mildred's abdomen, but she refused. Instead, she cleaned the wound herself and stitched it up alone in their shared living quarters. She wiped the mud and blood away with water kept in an upturned helmet. 

As she did this, she repeated the vow to herself over and over again, and with each new loop she felt calmer. 

Emotion would not rule her any longer. She'd stay calm, professional and removed. She's lean on the protocol. She'd keep a controlled voice and a clean uniform. And she'd have the rules on her side. They'd be her guide. Her God. And through them, she'd keep as many people alive as she could. 

In the months that followed, from deployment to rest and back to deployment, Mildred saw much more death and suffering, but her thinking had shifted and so did her approach. She invented new sanitization methods. She adapted new protocols. Dozens of lives were saved by her new methods. Possibly hundreds. She rose in the ranks and wound up in charge of a moving ward of 22 nurses. She got quite good at running them and they learned to respect her icy demeanor and her tightly run ship. In this world, good orders meant the difference between life and death. And in this world, Mildred became commended. Respected.

Important. 

Nearly a year into the war, in a moment of quiet and rest back in England, Mildred got a telegram. She never got telegrams and she recognized the formal American military approach of it before she even read it. And she didn't have to read it to know what it said. She only had one reason to get one. Aside from her parents, there was only one other person back home who even knew her name. 

Mildred sat crisply outside after reading it, staring out at a London blackened by soot and bombed by the Blitz. She was still a virgin. She might aways remain one. And there were no children for her to look after. But the truth was, by this point in her young life, she could no longer imagine anything beyond war. 

Two weeks later, D Day arrived. 

Mildred stood isolated, watching fireworks light the sky, watching planes fly overhead, watching everyone kiss and hug and dance and shout around her. So happy, all of them. 

She felt nothing at all. Part of her was now frozen forever in the war, victory curls and all. Trapped forever in survival mode. And now, part of her would never leave. 

She went back home to San Fransisco after a final month in London. Only her mother was still alive - her father had passed just before Mildred returned - and there was no one else Mildred knew or cared for. She took a small room above a dentist's office and hardly left or slept for months. She kept the shades drawn. She couldn't imagine someone touching her and anyone getting close emotionally terrified her. It made her think of blood and bone, or of the patient's swollen face that her hand went through, or of her husband's distant eyes and cold clammy lips, now rotting in the ground somewhere to a grave she'd never gone to. She spent almost six months inside, only going out for groceries, before finally accepting a nursing job again, wondering over and over what for? What had all of this been for? What did she have left in her life?

Her first day back at a normal, safe job, in a crisp white ward wearing a crisp white uniform, she was able to calm down an old woman in the middle of a panic attack. The woman clung tightly to Mildred, thanking her over and over, head buried in Mildred's shoulder. And Mildred had the answer. This. It was all for this. Helping people. Calming them down, keeping them stable. She had done that, she knew how to do it, she was good at it, and she could continue. And through that work, her postwar life could still have value. So she'd do right by them here, stateside. Home, so to speak, if anything could ever be her home. 

She took a better-paying job with a good future an hour south of San Fransisco. The job had been offered directly to her because the ward was focused on improving patient health, and that was now Mildred's background. This new job allowed her the ability to do what had worked so well for her in the war: improving on old types of healing. For nearly a decade on, she used her patients for new types of psychotherapy, finding as many new ways as she could to keep people calm and stable. She researched and tested new ways of fixing them and combined them with the old: electroshock, lobotomies, talk therapy, soothing music. The talk therapy and soothing music seemed to work best: they kept patients in psychosis calmer, quieter. They let patients get out the worst nightmares and fears inside them. 

Ten years passed this way. She grew older. She was offered multiple promotions. She came almost to run the hospital on her own, after a time: her removed calm manner gained a lot of respect from the nursing staff just the same as it had gained her respect from soldiers in the war, and she leaned into it in exactly the same way. She kept her voice forever calm and quiet, kept a clean and ordered ward, and she dressed, walked and spoke like an authority: long sweeping black cape, carefully modulated voice, no makeup, victory rolls, and uncrackable calm. 

This is how she was, at forty years old, on the day McMurphy arrived. She was arriving to work while they were removing his handcuffs. And the sight of him: capped head, wild eyes, a slight dance the second he was free. Her body reacted in a way she wasn't prepared for, a slight tingling between her legs. She didn't understand it, couldn't acknowledge it, and simply felt a slight moment of confusion and panic that she crushed as quickly as it came. He was her patient. And even if he wasn't a patient, it wouldn't matter. She was an old maid now long past her usefulness in every other way but nursing. So it didn't matter. But her was her patient. Her duty was to help him get better. 

As he was in intake procedures, she read his file. He'd been jailed for raping a fourteen year old girl. He'd possibly been faking mental disturbance for a relief from work duty. But there was something about his eyes, when he first sat into a session on talk therapy. Something in his eyes. She could see, under his cockiness and easy smile, that he too was distressed, the same as many voluntary patients. 

He needed rules, and he needed calm. Perhaps he could, in time, stop behaving in such a destructive manner. He wouldn't be the first to do so under her care. So she was going to administer that care to him, just as she had with everyone else.

He was difficult at first, but no more than some patients could be. He brought in pornographic playing cards. He invaded the nursing station. He disrupted quiet time and agitated many of the mobile patients with some prattle about a baseball game. Just to show her up. She refused to let it get to her. And she refused to acknowledge the slight tingle. How a tiny, terrifying part of her wondered what it would be like to kiss him. She hated that part. She would crush it, remain calm, and keep order.

When the conference was called between the head of the hospital, she made it clear. They needed to help him. He was too dangerous to be out into the world. But he could be fixed. And she could fix him. He needed to be brought to heel. 

But then he stole a bus and drove away, taking half her ward along. It was one of the more tense days of her life, making hundreds of calls around the state while standing in a half-empty ward. Hours of terror wondering how many people he'd hurt, if any of them were lost or scared or worse. And when they were found, they were on a boat of all things. He'd done that just to show her up again - but this time he'd endangered them all just to do it.

But instead of finally relaxing into her care, he got worse, more rebellious. He riled up the entire ward quite literally the next day, to the point where Tabor began howling, Chezwick was screaming for cigarettes, and she was forced to prescribe electroshock therapy just to slow him down.

But it didn't work. Just a day later, after just a few hours of rest, he destroyed the entire ward.

She arrived that morning to unlocked windows, broken glass on the floor, alcohol staining the faces of catatonic patients who were unable to swallow, half-dressed naked women sleeping on the floor, and her crushed and dirtied cap lost in the chaos. 

The war had trained her well. She got over her shock in seconds and restored order quickly, doing a mental countdown of who needed to be split up, cared for or disiplined so this would never happen again. But when the last one missing was Billy ... 

... when she discovered the woman holding poor, sweet, slow Billy, both of them naked on the bed ... and she knew who had goaded him into that ... 

... when Billy rushed out of the room, scrambling to put his pants on, to a ward full of applause ... Mildred broke. Numb fury settled into her bones. Anger like she'd never felt in her life. Quiet. Cold. Billy was in her care, they were all in her care, and now there were potentially patients dying from alcohol poisoning, Billy potentially infected with disease, patients potentially escaped or traumatized further by what they'd seen overnight, and all because of one single man who would never ever look at Mildred as if she could be ... 

She crushed the thought again. This could not be allowed. None of this could ever, ever be allowed again. She was going to lock this down now. 

The first person her eyes landed on, after this cold fury descended, was Billy. And she knew exactly what to say to him to begin to get her control back.

*

Billy's blood on her hands was warm, and when she felt for his pulse it was more out of instinct than anything. She's seen death before.

It was her worst fears come to life. She could barely exert control now. Mildred pushed them back out into the hall, trying desperately all the same, so desperately that she missed the hate in McMurphy's eyes ... at least until he wrapped his hands around her throat and threw her against the wall and then against the floor and tried to take her life from her. 

As security pulled him off her and she coughed and gasped for air on the dirty tile floor, as her lungs slowly refilled, as the air rushed in and out painfully from her windpipe, she knew there was only one way to get her control back now. 

Only one option left to stop this getting even worse. Only one person had caused all of this. And she had to do whatever she had to, to stop him. 

*

The most important thing to know about Mildred was that she spent her whole life ordinary. Even when she was capable, even when she did good. 

The second most important thing is that, in worst moment of her life, in the second time she ever lost control, the evil that she did, in the name of doing good, was just as ordinary as anything else.


End file.
